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The Theatre Portal

Ancient Greece theatre in Taormina, Sicily, Italy

Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors, to present experiences of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance.

Modern Western theatre comes, in large measure, from the theatre of ancient Greece, from which it borrows technical terminology, classification into genres, and many of its themes, stock characters, and plot elements. Theatre artist Patrice Pavis defines theatricality, theatrical language, stage writing and the specificity of theatre as synonymous expressions that differentiate theatre from the other performing arts, literature and the arts in general. (Full article...)

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This naval battle was one of the sets for Elkanah Settle's Empress of Morocco
The Restoration spectacular, or elaborately staged "machine play", hit the London public stage in the late 17th-century Restoration period, enthralling audiences with action, music, dance, moveable scenery, baroque illusionistic painting, gorgeous costumes, and special effects such as trapdoor tricks, "flying" actors, and fireworks. These shows have always had a bad reputation as a vulgar and commercial threat to the witty, "legitimate" Restoration drama; however, they drew Londoners in unprecedented numbers and left them dazzled and delighted. Basically home-grown and with roots in the early 17th-century court masque, though never ashamed of borrowing ideas and stage technology from French opera, the spectaculars are sometimes called "English opera". The expense of mounting ever more elaborate scenic productions drove the two competing theatre companies into a dangerous spiral of huge expenditure and correspondingly huge losses or profits.
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In this month

Anton Chekhov

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Bronze bust of Hordern
Michael Hordern (3 October 1911 – 2 May 1995) was an English stage and film actor best known for his Shakespearean roles, especially King Lear, whom he played on stage in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1969 and London in 1970 and on television five years later. Hordern came to prominence in the 1950s with the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre where he played Caliban in The Tempest and Jaques in As You Like It. With Michael Benthall's company at the Old Vic, he played Polonius in Hamlet, and the title role in King John. In 1958 he won a best actor award at the British Academy Television Awards for his role as the barrister in John Mortimer's courtroom drama The Dock Brief. He appeared in nearly 140 cinema roles, including Cleopatra (1963) and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966). His television credits include Paradise Postponed, the BAFTA-award-winning Memento Mori, and the BBC adaptation of Middlemarch. He was knighted in 1983.

Did you know (auto-generated) - load new batch

  • ... that in 1911 the Butterfly Theater featured a pipe organ worth US$10,000 (equivalent to US$327,000 in 2023)?
  • ... that there were at least seven unsuccessful attempts to redevelop New York City's Kings Theatre before it reopened in 2015?
  • ... that although Agnes Kimball was a popular recording artist of opera and musical theatre, she never appeared as a singing actress on the stage?
  • ... that Esther Merle Jackson, as a specialist in theatre and dance education at the United States Office of Education, intended to expand theater's role in the Great Society?
  • ... that Sharifa Yazmeen, a transgender Egyptian-American theatre director, was the inaugural winner of the Barbara Whitman Award?
  • ... that the American play His Majesty Bunker Bean was a national hit that had "been seen by most of the country east of the Mississippi River" before it reached Broadway?
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William Shakespeare
All the world's a stage / And all the men and women merely players / They have their exits and their entrances / And one man in his time plays many parts ...

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Garrick Theatre

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